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The George Awakens

A strange thing has happened since the release of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”: people are talking about George Lucas with something other than contempt. Credit Photograph by Nicky Loh / Bloomberg via Getty

For fanboys everywhere “The Force Awakens” was supposed to have one happy side effect: it would exile George Lucas from the galaxy he created. In 2012, Lucas sold his company and his homegrown mythology—I think we call it I.P. now—to Disney. To no one’s chagrin, Disney discarded his proposed stories; Lucas kept his distance while J. J. Abrams jump-started the franchise. As Lucas told Charlie Rose last month, meddling with a “Star Wars” movie would be like cruising by an ex-girlfriend’s house to see what she was up to.

Then the new movie came out, and a strange thing happened. Even as critics saluted “The Force Awakens” and fans turned it into a billion-dollar hit, both camps have come scurrying to the feet of Lucas, the master, rather than Abrams, the apprentice. To call what’s happening a full-blown critical reëvaluation is perhaps going too far. It’s more like a reawakening. For the first time in a more than a decade people are talking about Lucas with something other than withering contempt.

Listen to the hum of the think pieces. Lucas’s original “Star Wars,” débuting in 1977, may have plundered everything from Kurosawa to “Flash Gordon,” but it “was at least an inspired act of cultural appropriation,” the Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik wrote last week. By contrast, Abrams only succeeded—per Vox’s Peter Suderman—in evoking Lucas’s movies. This is the gist of the Lucas reawakening: that in the era of reboots, his pastiches have a kind of integrity. “ ‘A New Hope’ and ‘Empire’ are both masterpieces of pop art in a way that none of the endlessly-proliferating Marvel-universe or D.C. blockbusters are likely to ever be,” the Times’ Ross Douthat wrote.

That argument you might have expected—new movies tend to send us back to the Blu-ray player, and the original trilogy never lost its glow. But even Lucas’s loathed “Star Wars” prequels have gotten a second look. They’re no longer seen as generation-smiting events—or just generation-smiting events. They’re noble failures. “In his clumsy way [Lucas] was going for what had never been done instead of redoing something that had,” New York’s David Edelstein wrote. Vice’s Brian Merchant left the theater after “The Force Awakens” “kind of wish[ing] it was more like the prequels. That George Lucas had been more involved.”

More than most directors, Lucas’s reputation has depended on whether the critic is looking at him through bifocals or Warby Parker glasses. The old—which is to say, baby boomer—critique went like this: Lucas is a product of the sixties. By trading a Black Panther’s clenched fist for Darth Vader’s, he set aside his generation’s political ideals. The lefty filmmaker Haskell Wexler, who died last month, once told me fondly, “Me wanting to make a terrifically socially relevant movie that reflects the angst, the fucked-up state of the planet—I think George could only do that allegorically, with some planet not called Earth.”

Lucas always thought he was viewed as more of a Pop artist than an artist, full stop. Even as he was preparing to sit next to President Obama at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony last month, Lucas told Rose, “I don’t really have a lot of awards, to be very honest with you.… I get a lot of little awards. I’ve got two Emmys.”

After Lucas directed the “Star Wars” prequels, the last of which came out in 2005, he found himself in a different critical vise. The new generation didn’t care about the ideals of the sixties. They cared about the ideals of the late seventies and eighties—the blockbuster era. For them Lucas had desecrated a second sacred cultural moment: one that promised not radical change but comfort—the warmth of Tatooine’s twin suns. These people also had Web browsers. Lucas was blasted by everyone from smart-asses in Ain’t It Cool News’ comments section to Red Letter Media’s Mr. Plinkett, who showed, excruciatingly and shot by shot, how Lucas had screwed up.

I met Lucas during this period. We sat next to a fireplace at Skywalker Ranch, under two very expensive-looking paintings of Queen Amidala, one of the unloved characters of the prequel saga; a portrait of a Dewback creature hung across the room. He was alternatively gee-whiz and grumpy, and his insistence of his rights as an artist seemed like a not-so-gentle reminder that he was one. At the time, fans were furious at Lucas for both the prequels and the changes he’d made—and refused to unmake—to the original films. “Of course, a lot of people said, ‘You can’t do that!’ “ Lucas said. “But artists forever have been changing their work. Even in movies, I’m like the least of the problem. But suddenly I can’t do it or I’m taking away their childhood or I’m doing something that’s just rabid.”

Sitting with the man who’d been the butt of so much ridicule, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him—and slightly guilty. If success obscured Lucas’s gifts as a director, it also obscured his vulnerability as a human.

“Why would I make any more of those when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?” Lucas said of the “Star Wars” movies. “I say, yeah, I don’t need that any more than anybody else does. We’re all doing this so we can either make a living so we can buy dinner or to get a little adulation to verify you as a worthwhile human being. And if you don’t get either one of those why are you doing it?”

Ten months later, Lucas sold the company.

It took a unique—well, derivative—sequel to create an atmosphere in which Lucas could be viewed in a new light. The biggest reason Lucas looks better is because “The Force Awakens” is an admission that, thirty-eight years later, the original can’t be topped. Here, Abrams is following not only his instinct for homage (to Steven Spielberg, to Gene Roddenberry) but also the blueprints for rebooting a beloved franchise. Be reverent to the source material. Scatter around plenty of “Easter eggs” for the fans. And, by all means, remake the most popular film in the series. After seeing “The Force Awakens” twice, I found myself thinking about the image of Rey (Daisy Ridley) on Jakku, living among rusting A.T.-A.T.s and a Star Destroyer.* She could be playing in a prop closet at Skywalker Ranch, or in a Gen X-er’s toy chest.

Abrams’s shortcomings as a rebooter also make it easier to appreciate Lucas. Lucas didn’t always think of himself as a great director. (He has often said he was mostly a great editor.) But he was a Tolkien-level master at creating new worlds—as the critic Tom Shone noted, he created so many that Abrams didn’t seem to feel the need to create any. For Lucas obtaining the power of cutting-edge special effects meant the implied responsibility not to wield them haphazardly. (The skill had slipped by the prequels.) Amid such dizzying special effects, Lucas demanded that his stories be clear and straightforward, even at the expense of artfulness. This attribute is the thing I most appreciate in the C.G.I. era, when—here I put on my bifocals—nearly every movie loses its mind about thirty minutes from the explosion-packed finale. The fuzziness over what intrigues begat the Resistance and the First Order in “The Force Awakens” never would have passed muster in Lucas’s original trilogy. (Again, the skill slipped with the prequels.)

Lucas’s reputation is getting shined up because he’s no longer in the crosshairs. This is how it’s supposed to go with sequels. Ridley Scott and James Cameron made the great “Alien” movies, then stepped aside for the lesser ones; nobody blames Spielberg for “Jaws: The Revenge.” So long as Lucas was the chief mythmaker and commercial guardian of “Star Wars,” he never had that luxury. Now he does. And though the two men are friends Lucas couldn’t have picked a better amanuensis than Abrams, who honors his heroes but doesn’t have it in him to drive a light sabre through their hearts. Abrams will never be a master.

The reawakening of Lucas also touches on a larger point about nostalgia. As John Seabrook wrote for this magazine in 1997, the original “Star Wars” “makes you feel longing for some unnameable thing that is always being lost … but it’s a longing sweetened by the promise that in the future we’ll figure out a way of getting the unnameable thing back.” Fans felt this longing after the prequels, only now it was nameable: we wanted the old “Star Wars”—our “Star Wars”—back.

“The Force Awakens” isn’t a bad attempt at resurrecting the old “Star Wars.” But it proves once and for all the folly of this kind of nostalgia. The thrill that cannot be recovered—by Lucas or Abrams or Rian Johnson—is the thrill of discovering the “Star Wars” universe for the first time. That’s the thrill that Lucas created.

I suspect Lucas is of two minds about his new puffing-up. On the one hand, he has seen his films—on “Charlie Rose,” he called them his “kids”—cloned in the manner that an army was once raised by the evil emperor on the planet Kamino. We’re so deep in the Reboot Era that we forget what a weird and dispiriting feeling that must be.

On the other hand, it must be satisfying to see his gifts as a director, so long forgotten, be praised. “The Force Awakens” makes it once again possible to think about George Lucas as a man of imagination, of conviction, and (minus Jar Jar Binks) of taste—as a brilliant appropriator rather than an average one. It took a forgery to get him called an artist.

*An earlier version of this post misidentified one of the ships among the wreckage on the planet Jakku.